young stellar object

A filament of the cosmic web stretches through the young universe, and strung along it like beads on a necklace are galaxies. In the core of the SSA22 protocluster, which in a few billion years will become the center of a massive cluster, these beads are still hot and dusty: stars are being born inside them, and cold gas serves as fuel.

In a close binary system, one star can spend years transferring its material to its companion, like a person gradually giving away everything they own. When the source runs dry, a dense core remains, wrapped in a cloud of its own leftovers.

The cloud L1688 in the constellation Ophiuchus resembles a dance floor where partners don't always hold hands. Astronomers have long assumed that gas in molecular clouds moves together with the young stars born within them.

In the stellar family of the Phoenix galaxy, there are five old globular clusters, and the sixth child was long considered a foundling. The object Fornax 6, located just 270 parsecs from the galaxy's center, looked like a random clump of field stars or a compact group of distant galaxies. Astronomers argued over whether it deserved to be called a cluster.

In the coldest, darkest corners of space, dust grains get covered in ice, like a window on a frosty day. This ice isn't just frozen water: it also contains carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. From such ice, comets and planets may eventually assemble. But until now, it was unclear how the dust grain itself affects the ice that forms on it.

Every morning, a janitor sweeps leaves into a pile. The Sun, as it travels through the galaxy, does something similar: its gravity gathers diffuse interstellar gas into an invisible cone — a giant funnel.

Galaxy NGC 5584 is a vast stellar city, where some neighborhoods are just being built while others are already marked by aging giants. To see both, astronomers used two very different flashlights. The ultraviolet telescope Swift lit up hot blue patches — stellar nurseries where massive stars have recently ignited.

A star wrapped in an invisible blanket warms up more than it should. That's exactly how ten red dwarfs look, which astronomers from the Hephaistos project have been monitoring. These stars lie within 300 parsecs (about 1000 light-years) of us and emit far more infrared energy than their modest sizes can explain.

In the deep field of JWST, among thousands of galaxies, astronomers zoomed in on the source JADES-GS 209777 – and saw a cosmic chick. Its "shell" is a thick cocoon of gas and cosmic dust that long hid the growing black hole at its center. But at a redshift of 3,711 (1,8 billion years after the Big Bang), the shell began to crack.

In the early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, astronomers see strange objects — little red dots. They are compact, red, and in their spectra, broad Balmer lines scream the presence of supermassive black holes. But how did the hole manage to accumulate millions of solar masses in such a short time?

The hunter of ancient light, the James Webb Telescope, aimed its mirrors at a tiny patch of sky and caught a strange beacon. The object, with the working name beacon_1420-$$5253_{4770}$$, flashed and faded. At first, it was logged as a candidate for the most distant galaxy, as if we were seeing it just 300 million years after the big bang.

Remember the sensational comet 1I/‘Oumuamua — the first object to come to us from another star? Its hyperbolic trajectory left no doubt: it was a wanderer from the interstellar void. But astronomers wondered: could some of these visitors not be strangers at all, but our own, escaped from the Solar System millions of years ago?

Tiny seeds of life can cross the black void on icy wanderers like comet 3I/ATLAS. The James Webb Space Telescope found water and methane on it for the first time, and light analysis revealed an unusual gas composition.

Right after the Big Bang, the Universe was a chemical desert — only hydrogen and helium, not a hint of metals. But moments passed (by cosmic standards), and the birth of the first stars — Population III — began.

In 2019, an unusual visitor, comet 3I/ATLAS, zoomed into the Solar System. It came from another star, and for the first time, astronomers were able to see what its dusty tail is made of.

Hidden in the globular cluster Terzan 5 is the binary system IGR J17480-2446. One of its members is a neutron star that behaves strangely. It spins at just 11 hertz (11 revolutions per second) and cools suspiciously slowly after an outburst. Usually, such stars spin hundreds of times faster and cool briskly — here, it's the opposite.

Stars are born in cold clouds of cosmic dust and hydrogen. Inside these cocoons, protostars — the cores of future suns — were long thought to be just hot clumps. But it turns out many of them are powerful accelerators: they shoot out narrow jets of gas that, slamming into surrounding matter, produce invisible gamma-ray light.

A giant baby planet is still pulling in leftover building material from its surrounding cloud. That's the scene the Hubble Space Telescope captured when it aimed its cameras at an object catalogued as SR 12 c. This companion planet orbits a young star at a wide distance — farther out than Neptune is from the Sun.

A giant cloud of invisible matter acts like a funhouse mirror — distorting the light from a distant galaxy. From these distortions, astronomers can weigh the cloud and peer into its depths.

In the heart of the Milky Way, in the cloud G+0.693, astronomers caught a sweet signal — emission lines of erythrulose, a simple sugar with four carbon atoms and four oxygen atoms.

The young super-Jupiter TWA5B, a scorching ball 25 times Jupiter's mass, floats just fifty light-years away. Its faint infrared glow long hid its chemical makeup. Now, high-resolution spectroscopy with CRIRES+ has registered the ghostly trace of SiO — silicon monoxide.

Using the James Webb telescope, astronomers peered into an ancient quasar — the dazzling heart of a galaxy where a giant black hole sucks in matter. It turns out it doesn't just destroy, but also creates: its powerful outflows and shock waves act like a true cosmic mill.

In the heart of the Eagle Nebula, about 7000 light-years away, three giant pillars of gas and dust rise — the Pillars of Creation. Their shape is familiar to many from Hubble Space Telescope images. Now, Webb's infrared camera has allowed us to peer inside these dense cocoons where stars are born.

An archaeologist holds in their hands not a clay shard but an actual star — a living snapshot of the era when the universe was just learning to produce anything heavier than lithium. That is exactly the kind of find astronomers describe in a new study. They spotted four dim stars so ancient and pristine in composition that their matter is barely diluted by the 'cosmic dust' of later generations.

Recently, astronomers spotted three interstellar comets coming from deep space. One of them, 3I/ATLAS, turned out to be unexpectedly large: its nucleus is several kilometers across.

A distant city seen through a fogged-up window: bright lights blur, details are lost. That's roughly how astronomers see gas with magnesium ions (magnesium) in our galaxy — the strongest spectral lines "peg the needle," preventing us from knowing how much material is really there.

Two watermelons of equal weight sit on a counter. One is ripe, juicy, with a thick rind. The other looks as if carved from oak: inside it is completely different, and squeezing it is nearly impossible. They look like twins, but tap them, and the difference is obvious.

At the edge of the Milky Way, there are stars that move against the general flow, like cars driving in the wrong lane. Previously, it was thought that all of them were remnants of one dwarf galaxy that our Galaxy tore apart and swallowed. But new research shows that there were several such 'oncoming' galaxies.

A newborn star is like a kitchen mixer: it whips up the surrounding cloud, and splatters fly in all directions. Only instead of batter, it's gas and dust. Previously, astronomers had only seen gas jets, and dust was considered too fragile: the shock wave should shatter dust grains into atoms.

In the open cluster Trumpler 5, where hundreds of stars move together, one star behaves like a teenager among elders. It pulsates — expanding and contracting, changing brightness every few hours.

Lithium is like a thermometer dipped into a star's interior. This light element is destroyed at temperatures around 2.5 million degrees, so its abundance on the surface tells us how deeply the star's material has been mixed.

The galaxy Holmberg IX is like a city where construction of new houses suddenly stopped, even though building materials are everywhere. Astronomers peered into it with various telescopes and saw a strange picture: plenty of gas and heavy elements, but almost no dust. Usually, where there's gas, new stars are born, but here it's different.

In the cold gas cloud where a star is born, chemistry sleeps. Molecules barely collide, reactions stall. But when a charged particle zips through the cloud, it knocks electrons off atoms — ionizing them. That's how active ions appear in a dormant cloud, ready to build new molecules.

Immediately after the Big Bang, an idea championed by Georges Lemaître, the cosmos was a dark broth of hydrogen and helium. Then the first stars ignited — enormous, dazzlingly bright and hot, like sparks from a cosmic bonfire.

Like a river that suddenly disappears underground, the Perseus Arm in the Milky Way breaks off in a region astronomers call the Giraffe Bay. Where the bright band of stars should continue, a dark 'void' is visible.

Long before a star ignites in a gas cloud, chemical life is already bustling. In cold, dense clumps of gas, called starless cores, atoms stick together to form molecules, both simple and complex. To peer into this invisible kitchen, astronomers aimed a 40-meter radio telescope in Yebes at 23 such clouds in the Orion Nebula.

A gas cloud the size of a small galaxy is falling into the Milky Way at hundreds of kilometers per second. Such clouds are called high-velocity clouds, and until now no stars had been found in them — only gas. Now, in one of them, named Complex H, astronomers have spotted a pair of young star clusters.

In a constellation where new stars are born, one of them behaves like a faulty lightbulb: sometimes shining steadily, sometimes dimming by a factor of several. Astronomers have been monitoring the star Gaia-GIC-1 for several years and now understand that its blinking is the shadow of a huge dust cloud that periodically passes in front of it.

When a massive star runs out of fuel, its core collapses and a shock wave races outward. But even before the star tears apart, particles that barely interact with ordinary matter may be born in its depths. If they decay into light, that energy leaks into the dense gas around the star. This gas, like a blanket, wraps the star.

A distant galaxy birthing hundreds of stars should glow in oxygen. That's what astronomers thought: hot young stars heat the gas, which then emits a characteristic infrared glow at a wavelength of 63 microns. It's like steam rising from a boiling pot — a sure sign of vigorous activity.